Conrad Quilty-Harper is a writer for Engadget, which, according to Technorati, was the most-linked to site on the internet over the past six months. He posts several stories a day, and works under contract to AOL, which is itself one of the biggest companies around.
Despite this, Conrad has been turned down for membership of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) on the grounds that he’s not eligible for full membership as he’s also still studying, but not eligible for student membership as he’s not studying a journalism-related course.
Let’s just run that through again: someone writing daily for one of the most-read sites on the net, who has a readership which probably rivals (or even beats) that of national newspapers, isn’t classed by the NUJ as a journalist?
This is the kind of silliness which is likely to mean that NUJ membership goes through a slow but gentlemanly decline over the next few years. Conrad is quite clearly a journalist, by any objective standard – except the silly ones the NUJ is applying here.
